Christopher Hitchens is an iconoclast’s iconoclast, famously willing to piss on anyone’s grave, whether it be Mother Tereasa, Bob Hope, or Teddy Kennedy. Interestingly, this time he smacks down with one hand whilst patting on the back with the other:

Sure, the “tragedy” of Chappaquiddick had its necessary moment, but even in those days Barbara Walters was doing her damage control, and it was amazing to see a clip of Walter Cronkite referring deadpan to the “driving accident” that had kept Kennedy away from the Senate. It must take some ingenuity at the networks, even so, to simply airbrush the fascist sympathies and bootlegging background of Joseph Kennedy Sr., his sons’ murder campaigns in Cuba, the recruitment of the mafia for same, the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, the increasingly frantic and pathetic narco-addictions of JFK, the exploitation of unstable broads like Marilyn Monroe, and so much else besides.

In some ways, this banana-republic coverage was a disservice even to the recently departed. After all, it was in part the case that the youngest brother had lived down the criminal and narcissistic and power-mad background of his family. His best biographer, Adam Clymer, wrote, on the morning after he died, that it was arguably wrong to see a discontinuity in Kennedy’s career and that he had actually been a decent-enough legislator before abandoning any yearning for the White House after 1980. This may be true as far as it goes, but the obituaries would still have had to be somewhat different in tone, even given the servility of the journalistic profession, if Kennedy had died at the time of the Au Bar episode in Palm Beach, for instance, and had not decided to take some kind of a pull on himself and become a citizen again instead of a drone.

A former Senate staffer of his stopped by for a drink last week and told me that, without fanfare, the socialist president of Chile had come in person to the Kennedy home a few months ago to bestow one of her nation’s highest human rights awards on him. His work on that subject alone was a part atonement for his siblings’ deployment of what Lyndon Johnson himself called “a goddam Murder Incorporated” in the Southern Hemisphere. So, of course, was his labor on health care (where Richard Nixon had a better political track record than the Kennedy administration) and his last decision to keep looking life in the face for as long as he had breath. In those waning months, after being disgusted by malicious anti-Obama propaganda being spread in the Democratic primaries—later picked up and used by the right in the general election—he withdrew his support from a candidate whose victory would have meant the continuation of the dynastic politics represented by the family names Bush, Gore, and Clinton. What a favor he did us all by that repudiation! And how fitting that it should have been a Kennedy who did it. The political rhetoric of Obamaism, alas, is even more bloviating at times than Camelot was, but you can’t have everything.

A fitting roundup, really.  The story of the youngest of the Kennedy brothers was of wretched excess and abuse of privilege followed by genuine and rather remarkable redemption.   As Hitch puts it in the close, “Kennedy’s very last year was quite possibly his best, and how many men or women will be able to say that?”

Glenn Beck continues to impress in his ability to top himself with zaniness.  Today, he explained how “they” have all manner of plans to destroy America and make it more like Cuba.  And “they” may be getting away with it because “they” are so far ahead of us.

For those who can’t view the video or hear the audio, MediaMatters provides the transcription:

If I could just — if we could just be like Cuba. Let me give you the last piece of evidence that there is a revolution going on, and it is coming. It is — there is a revolution, and they think they can get away with it quietly.

They think they — and they — they — you know what? At this point, gang, I’m not sure, they may be able to because they are so far ahead of us. They know what they’re dealing against; most of America does not yet. Most of America doesn’t have a clue as to what’s going on. There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America, and the way it is done, it has been done through the — the guise of an election, but they lied to us the entire time.

Some of us knew! Some of us we’re shouting out, you were: “this guy’s a Marxist!” “No, no, no, no, no, no.” And they’re gonna say, “we did it democratically,” and they are going to grab power every way they can. And God help us in an emergency.

I’m not sure who “They” are but I’m scared of them.

Seriously, to borrow from George Will, no serious person nowadays takes Glenn Beck seriously anymore.  While I was lamenting Barack Obama’s skill at running a presidential campaign without actually saying anything two years or more ago, it’s hard to argue that he didn’t make it clear that he wanted a government-run health care program.  (Although he’s likely to settle for something much, much less than that out of political necessity.) What, precisely, is it that “they” are doing — through the guise of an election — that was hidden from us?

For that matter, even aside from the Cuba hyperbole, it looks as if the Republican minority, through a combination of the hesitancy of the Blue Dog Democrats to go along with their party’s leadership and having successfully mobilized public fear of the the Democrats’ plans, will prevail in stemming the worst of it.  So what is it that Beck’s talking about?

Remember those 17 Uighar captives at Gitmo being held in a state of limbo because nobody would take them?  Palau has come to our rescue.

The tropical Pacific island nation of Palau announced Wednesday it will accept up to 17 Chinese Muslims who have languished in legal limbo at Guantanamo Bay despite a Pentagon determination that they are not “enemy combatants.”

China’s Foreign Ministry had no immediate reaction to the decision by Palau to grant Washington’s request to resettle the detainees from China’s Uighur minority who had been incarcerated at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. Palau is one of a handful of countries that does not recognize China and maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

President Johnson Toribiong said Palau was accepting the detainees “as a humanitarian gesture” intended to help them restart their lives. His archipelago, with a population of about 20,000, will accept up to 17 of the detainees subject to periodic review, Toribiong said in a statement released to The Associated Press. “This is but a small thing we can do to thank our best friend and ally for all it has done for Palau,” he said.

A former U.S. trust territory in the Pacific, Palau has retained close ties with the United States since independence in 1994 when it signed a Free Compact of Association with the U.S. While it is independent, it relies heavily on U.S. aid and is dependent on the United States for its defense. Native-born Palauans are allowed to enter the United States without passports or visas.

I suppose there are worse fates than being exiled to a tropical paradise.

In my latest for New Atlanticist, “Preconditions, Preparations, and Posturing,” I argue that Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and perhaps even Nicholas Burns are misreading the now 16-month-old debate over Barack Obama’s pledge to meet “without precondition, during the first year of [his] administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.”

Said an American politician, speaking to an international audience:

“I speak today as both a citizen of the United States and of the world. I come with the heartfelt wishes of my people for peace, bearing honest proposals and looking for genuine progress.”

I mean can you imagine? Didn’t this politician know that he was an American? What kind of internationalist claptrap was he peddling?

Thankfully there are a number of folks issuing correctives to such odd ways of thinking.

As Victor Davis Hanson noted

I would not speak to anyone as “a fellow citizen of the world,” but only as an ordinary American who wishes to do his best for the world, but with a much-appreciated American identity, and rather less with a commonality indistinguishable from those poor souls trapped in the Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, or Iran. Take away all particular national identity and we are empty shells mouthing mere platitudes, who believe in little and commit to even less.

And James Lileks:

Novel sentiments aside, “World citizen” is used as a badge of empathy that carries no responsibilities. The more it’s used, though, the more it dilutes actual national citizenship, which naturally takes second place to World Citizenship…To say you’re a citizen of the world and a citizen of America places the latter in the primary slot, no?

Or as J.D. Longstreet of the Conservative Voice said this week:

I have a lot of difficulty relating to anyone who claims citizenship in the world. Frankly, that person is frightening. Saying one is a citizen of the world negates one’s actual citizenship as’ well, a native of the country within which he/she was born and, to which, he/she owes allegiance. Saying you are a citizen of the world is too’well’ vague.

I mean really what was Ronald Reagan thinking?!?

The horror of the phrase is just about too much for me to bear.

Update: I mistakenly left off the links to the quotes last night, and that problem has been fixed.

I will also step back from glibness for the moment and point out that there is, no doubt plenty of things in the Obama speech that can be criticized, especially from a Republican/conservative point of view. However, my point with this post is that to attack the phrase “citizen of the world’ (which has been jumped on by many in the conservative commentariat) is a bit silly, as it is an empty phrase that is frequently used, and not just by persons of a particular ideological persuasion.

If anything, there is not world “citizenship” as there is no global legal entity. And regardless of what one may think about Obama, he isn’t going to be working towards One World Government.

In short, I find the fixation on the phrase to be interesting. Partially because it reflects, I think, an enhanced nationalism in some portions of the right post-9/11 and partially because it strikes me in terms of pure politics to be a pretty poor line of attack. On the last point I think that if one of the best attacks that pro-McCain folks can make about Obama’s trip was that he used the phrase “citizen of the world” then it must have been one heckuva successful trip.

The United States has not had a formal diplomatic presence in Iran since our embassy there was stormed and its staff taken hostage on November 4, 1979.  That may soon change, Ewen MacAskin reports for The Guardian.

The Guardian has learned that an announcement will be made in the next month to establish a US interests section – a halfway house to setting up a full embassy. The move will see US diplomats stationed in the country.

The news of the shift by Bush who has pursued a hawkish approach to Iran throughout his tenure comes at a critical time in US-Iranian relations. After weeks that have seen tensions rise with Israel conducting war games and Tehran carrying out long-range missile tests, a thaw appears to be under way.

[...]

A frequent complaint of the Iranians is that they want to deal directly with the Americans instead of its surrogates, Britain, France and Germany.

Bush has taken a hard line with Iran throughout the last seven years but, in the dying days of his administration, it is believed he is keen to have a positive legacy that he can point to.

The return of US diplomats to Iran is dependent on agreement by Tehran. But President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indicated earlier this week that he was not against the opening of a US mission. Iran would consider favourably any request aimed at boosting relations between the two countries, he said.

[...]

The special interests section would be similar to the one in Havana, Cuba. The US broke off relations with Cuba in 1961 after Castro’s takeover but US diplomats returned in 1977. The special interests section carries out all the functions of an embassy. It is, in terms of protocol, part of the Swiss embassy but otherwise is staffed by Americans and independent of the Swiss.

The fact of the matter is that we have had diplomatic relations with the Iranian government in all but name throughout this period.  Indeed, we negotiated the release of our Embassy hostages.  Less happily, the Reagan administration engaged in a convoluted and illegal sale of arms to the Iranians in exchange for cash to illegally support the Nicaraguan Contras.  And the Bush administration, despite saber rattling, has obviously been talking as well.

The amusing thing about these reports is the stance that our relations with Iran deteriorated markedly under Bush.  After all, Bill Clinton had eight years in office during a much more settled period in U.S. – Middle East relations and made no serious moves in this direction.

Christopher Hitchens joins the legions dancing on Jesse Helms’ grave.   Rather than piling on about the racism of a Southern politician whose career began sixty-odd years ago, he instead focuses on Helms’ foreign policy:

His chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a period of national embarrassment and, sometimes, disgrace. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996, imposing additional economic sanctions on Cuba, multiplied the misery and beggary of Cuba’s luckless inhabitants while doing nothing whatever to weaken its military dictatorship. Helms’ amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act in 1973, forbidding American aid to any family-planning groups that even mentioned the option of abortion, also greatly added to the woes and miseries of millions of Africans. (Fairness obliges me to say that in his last year in the Senate he did somewhat relax his equally stubborn and reactionary opposition to measures designed to combat AIDS in Africa. But this was only because it had by then become obvious that the disease was heterosexually transmitted. In general, his attitude to the AIDS plague was determined by a Bible-based bigotry that saw it as divine retribution for perversion.)

I make no apology for calling him a provincial redneck, because that, to be fair to him once more, was how he thought of himself and even described himself. It was a scandal that a man with so little knowledge of the outside world should have had such a stranglehold on American foreign policy for so long. He once introduced Benazir Bhutto as the prime minister of India. All right, that could have happened to anybody. But what about the hearings on North Korea in which he made repeated references to “Kim Jong the Second”? In order to prevent any repetition of this idiotic gaffe, Helms’ staff propped up a piece of card on which was clearly written the pronunciation “Kim Jong ILL.” The senator from North Carolina duly made the adjustment, referring thenceforth to the North Korean despot as “Kim Jong the Third.”

That’s pretty funny right there. (And shouldn’t it have been “Kim Jong the 99th”?)

UPDATE: Marc Theissen, the chief White House speechwriter and spokesman for Helms from 1995 to 2001, presents the opposing view:

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms led the successful effort to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the NATO alliance. He secured passage of bipartisan legislation to protect our men and women in uniform from the International Criminal Court. He won overwhelming approval for his legislation to support the Cuban people in their struggle against a tyrant. He won majority support in the Senate for his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He helped secure passage of the National Missile Defense Act and stopped the Clinton administration from concluding a new anti-ballistic missile agreement in its final months in office — paving the way for today’s deployment of America’s first defenses against ballistic missile attack. He helped secure passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which expressed strong bipartisan support for regime change in Baghdad. He secured broad, bipartisan support to reorganize the State Department and bring much-needed reform to the United Nations, and he became the first legislator from any nation to address the U.N. Security Council — a speech few in that chamber will forget.

Not all of those policy outcomes were good ones and most of  represent the provincialism Hitchens accuses him of.  But it’s true that Helms was a powerful leader, not merely an obstructionist, in foreign affairs.

David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was testifying under subpoena yesterday to the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. He took great delight in being a complete jackass, as Dana Milbank details.

Could the president ever be justified in breaking the law? “I’m not going to answer a legal opinion on every imaginable set of facts any human being could think of,” Addington growled. Did he consult Congress when interpreting torture laws? “That’s irrelevant,” he barked. Would it be legal to torture a detainee’s child? “I’m not here to render legal advice to your committee,” he snarled. “You do have attorneys of your own.”

He had the grace of Gollum as he quarreled with his questioners. In response to one of the chairman’s questions, he neither looked up nor spoke before finishing a note he was writing to himself. When Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) questioned his failure to remember conversations about interrogation techniques, he only looked at her and asked: “Is there a question pending, ma’am?” Finally, at the end of the hearing, Addington was asked whether he would meet privately to discuss classified matters. “You have my number,” he said. “If you issue a subpoena, we’ll go through this again.”

[...]

When John Conyers (D-Mich.) inquired about Addington’s pet legal concept, a “unitary executive theory” that confers extreme powers on the president, Addington dished out disdain.

“I frankly don’t know what you mean by unitary theory,” Addington replied. “Have you ever heard of that theory before?” “I see it in the newspapers all the time,” Addington replied. “Do you support it?” “I don’t know what it is.” The usually mild Conyers was angry. “You’re telling me you don’t know what the unitary theory means?” “I don’t know what you mean by it,” Addington answered. “Do you know what you mean by it?”

While I must admit chuckling all the way through the story at the spectacle, Phil Carter is not amused. “Calling Addington and Yoo hostile witnesses doesn’t begin to describe the level of their contempt for Congress, the hearing and the democratic processes that brought them to testify by way of a subpoena.”

Then again, it’s easy to have contempt for this particular process. Unlike Phil, I’m not an attorney. But it seems to me that these are precisely the kind of answers one ought expect from a hostile witness presented with inane, hypothetical questions.

Congress has every right — indeed, a duty — to investigate suspected wrongdoing on the part of the executive branch. But it’s far from clear how this set of questioning was supposed to be helpful toward that end. The man is an adviser to the vice president, not a would-be Supreme Court Justice. What difference does it make what his pet theories of executive power are? What matters is what actions the president and his team actually took.

Wouldn’t it have been far more useful, then, to ask specific questions about specific activities that took place in Addington’s presence? Indeed, it appears that, in the rare times that was the case, Addington was much more forthcoming.

Addington didn’t submit written testimony and barely had an oral presentation, preferring instead to simply answer — or, as the case often was, not answer — questions presented to him. Nor does the subcommittee yet have a transcript of the testimony available. But, relying on other press accounts such as Dan Eggen’s report for WaPo, Scott Shane’s NYT account, and this AP report it appears that Addington in fact cooperated when Members asked him substantive questions.

For example,

Addington, who has been widely described as one of the key forces behind the Bush administration’s most aggressive counterterrorism policies, said some reports of his involvement were overstated. He said, for example, that he was briefed by Yoo about his 2002 memo but that he had no role in shaping it. Addington also said he was more deeply involved in the CIA’s interrogation program than the one used by the Pentagon at the military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Under the CIA program, high-level detainees were kept in secret prisons abroad and subjected to harsh interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, or simulated drowning.

Or,

Mr. Addington recalled discussing the document with Mr. Yoo and Alberto R. Gonzales, then counsel to President Bush.

“My memory is of Professor Yoo coming over to see the counsel to the president and I was invited in the meeting with the three of us, and he gave us an outline of ‘here are the subjects I’m going to address,’ ” Mr. Addington said.

“We said, ‘Good,’ ” he added. “And he goes off and writes the opinion.”

More questioning along those lines might have gotten us somewhere. Instead, we got nonsense about hypothetical child torture or questions based on journalistic fantasies of Bush’s mind.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum and Steven Bainbridge offer interesting insights on this that are in line with my own impressions. I’m rather pleased, having expected to be an outlier with this take. This, despite Drum seeing my “complete jackass” and raising it with an “Addington is not only an arrogant prick, he’s the kind of person who revels in being an arrogant prick.”

The cover story of the current Atlantic (Monthly) is an interesting piece by Nicholas Carr which asks, Is Google Making Us Stupid? It begins with the standard “the Internet is giving us short attention spans” meme but eventually gives us much more than that.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

[...]

Reading, explains [Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University], is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Much, much more at the link. It’s worth a read, presuming you have the attention span.

Max Boot and Ross Douthat debate the merits of Carr’s arguments vis-a-vis writing and reading books, with the former emphasizing the Internet’s virtues and the latter the drawbacks. For his part, Matt Yglesias was experiencing the Googlization of his brain but he’s been saved by the gift of Kindle.

My own experience closely mirrors Ezra Klein’s. I can still sit down with a stack of books as efficiently as before if I’ve got a major research project or book review due. But, increasingly, the Internet is my source of first resort for looking up facts, keeping up with the news, and the like. It’s simply a much more efficient means of accessing current information than combing the stacks at the library.

Moreover, half a decade of blogging has transformed me from a pure consumer of information into a content provider. Increasingly, I’m reading with the major purpose of finding topics to blog about and links and information to share with readers. That naturally leads to more skimming and hopping around than reading simply for the sake of deepening one’s own knowledge. But that was just as true when I went from being a political junkie reading non-fiction for enjoyment to a scholar skimming dozens of books and articles for material to use in my research.

George Will joins the Blame America crowd on the issue of high oil prices.

Responding to Chuck Schumer’s suggestion that we block arms sales to Saudi Arabia until it “increases its oil production by one million barrels per day,” which would cause the price of gasoline to fall “50 cents a gallon almost immediately,” Will notes that notes that, “One million barrels is what might today be flowing from ANWR if in 1995 President Bill Clinton had not vetoed legislation to permit drilling there.” Schumer opposes drilling there even today, as do both Barack Obama and John McCain.

Will doesn’t stop there:

Also disqualified from complaining are all voters who sent to Washington senators and representatives who have voted to keep ANWR’s oil in the ground and who voted to put 85 percent of America’s offshore territory off-limits to drilling. The U.S. Minerals Management Service says that restricted area contains perhaps 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — 10 times as much oil and 20 times as much natural gas as Americans use in a year.

Drilling is underway 60 miles off Florida. The drilling is being done by China, in cooperation with Cuba, which is drilling closer to South Florida than U.S. companies are. [emphasis mine]

ANWR is larger than the combined areas of five states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware), and drilling along its coastal plain would be confined to a space one-sixth the size of Washington’s Dulles airport.

He closes with this zinger:

America says to foreign producers: We prefer not to pump our oil, so please pump more of yours, thereby lowering its value, for our benefit. Let it not be said that America has no energy policy.

Of course, changing our policy this minute wouldn’t effect prices at the pump for quite some time. But decisions made 10, 20, and 30 years ago have certainly hampered our long-stated goal of “energy independence.”

John Steele Gordon makes some very slight edits to the NYT’s 2000 endorsement of Al Gore over George W. Bush:

Mr. Obama has asked to be judged by something more than his positions. He offers himself as an experienced leader who would end the culture of bickering in Washington and use wisdom and resoluteness in dealing with domestic social problems and international crises. But his resume is too thin for the nation to bet on his growing into the kind of leader he claims already to be. He does have great personal charm. But Mr. Obama’s main professional experience was a few undistinguished years as a back bencher in the Illinois and U.S. Senates. His debates with his primary opponents exposed an uneasiness with foreign policy that cannot be erased by his promise to have heavyweight advisers. John F. Kennedy, as a far more seasoned new president, struggled through the Cuban missile crisis while his senior advisers offered contradictory advice on how to confront a Soviet military threat on America’s doorstep. The job description is for commander in chief, not advisee in chief.

The Senator from Arizona has admitted to his limitations as a speaker. But John McCain has a heart–and a mind–prepared for presidential-scale challenges. When it comes to the details of policy making, he will not need on-the-job training.

Compare it to the original at Gordon’s site. While we almost assuredly won’t see the Times make the same argument against Obama this time, the original proved rather prescient.

Photoshop courtesy Unconfirmed Sources

A judge overseeing war crimes cases in Guantanamo Bay has been dismissed from trial without much in the way of explanation.

A judge hearing a war crimes case at Guantanamo Bay who publicly expressed frustration with military prosecutors’ refusal to give evidence to the defense has been dismissed, tribunal officials confirmed Friday.

Army Col. Peter Brownback III was presiding over the case of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr. Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, in his role as chief judge at Guantanamo, ordered the dismissal without explanation and announced Brownback’s replacement in an e-mail this week to lawyers in Khadr’s case.

[...]

Charges of conspiracy and supporting terrorism were prepared for Ghassan Abdullah Sharbi, a Saudi with an engineering degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; fellow Saudi Jabran Said bin Qahtani; and Algerian Sufyian Barhoumi. The three are alleged to have attended Al Qaeda training camps and studied bomb-making.

Brownback had threatened to suspend the proceedings against Khadr unless prosecutors handed over Khadr’s medical and interrogation records since his July 2002 capture in Afghanistan.

Khadr’s Navy lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler, had asked for the records months ago, and Brownback had ordered the government to produce them.

The lead prosecutor in the Khadr case, Marine Maj. Jeffrey Groharing, this week reiterated to Brownback his view that the defense wasn’t entitled to the records. He urged the judge to set a trial date.

Read the whole thing. Phil Carter has the best analogy for this case.

Imagine if, during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Judge Lance Ito ordered the district attorney’s office to hand over DNA samples and logs of O.J.’s stay in county jail after his arrest. Then imagine that the prosecutors refused to do so. And that, instead of being fined for contempt of court (or thrown in jail themselves), these same prosecutors somehow got their boss to get Ito tossed off the bench. And then the D.A.’s office worked behind the scenes to replace Ito with a more, shall we say, compliant judge.

Wouldn’t happen. Couldn’t happen. Never in a million years. Not even in California.

Well, Cuba isn’t California, and Guantanamo Bay is further still.

Indeed. I don’t know if Khadr is guilty of the war crimes with which he is charged or not. He may well be. But how can anyone trust the judgment of the court if basic principles of process aren’t followed and if defense attorneys aren’t given access to the evidence necessary to build a case?

Update: In the comments below, Bill Dyer links to this article, giving the Pentagon’s official take on Col. Brownback’s dismissal:

Judge Army Col. Peter Brownback was replaced because his duty orders expire later this month, said Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, the chief judge in the U.S. war crimes court at the Guantanamo naval base.

[...]

The Pentagon issued a statement on Friday saying Brownback and the Army had mutually decided he would return to retirement when his active-duty orders expire later this month.

But Kohlmann said in statement on Monday that Brownback had been willing to stay on as long as needed. He said the Army declined in February to extend Brownback’s service “based on a number of manpower management considerations” unrelated to the trials.

Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, who is the defense attorney assigned to Khadr, is unconvinced.

Khadr’s lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, called the explanation “odd to say the least,” given that the Defense Department had recently put out a call urging Navy lawyers to volunteer as judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys in the Guantanamo trials, as a national priority assignment.

I would find it easier to believe the Pentagon were it not for the fact that there are quite a few military lawyers speaking out about the political pressure prizing convictions over process. And even if the Pentagon’s statements are correct, that does nothing to change the fact that the prosecutors in the Khadr case are defying a judge’s orders in refusing to turn incriminating evidence over to the defense so that a proper case can be prepared.

Spanish-only speakers have an easier time getting by in Miami than English-only speakers, AP reports.

In many areas of Miami, Spanish has become the predominant language, replacing English in everyday life. Anyone from Latin America could feel at home on the streets, without having to pronounce a single word in English. In stores, shopkeepers wait on their clients in Spanish. Universities offer programs for Spanish speakers. And in supermarkets, banks, restaurants — even at the post office and government offices — information is given and assistance is offered in Spanish. In Miami, doctors and nurses speak Spanish with their patients and a large portion of advertising is in Spanish. Daily newspapers and radio and television stations cater to the Hispanic public.

But this situation, so pleasing to Latin American immigrants, makes some English speakers feel marginalized. In the 1950s, it’s estimated that more than 80 percent of Miami-Dade County residents were non-Hispanic whites. But in 2006, the Census Bureau estimates that number was only 18.5 percent, and in 2015 it is forecast to be 14 percent. Hispanics now make up about 60 percent.

“The Anglo population is leaving,” said Juan Clark, a sociology professor at Miami Dade College. “One of the reactions is to emigrate toward the north. They resent the fact that (an American) has to learn Spanish in order to have advantages to work. If one doesn’t speak Spanish, it’s a disadvantage.”

According to the Census, 58.5 percent of the county’s 2.4 million residents speak Spanish — and half of those say they don’t speak English well. English-only speakers make up 27.2 percent of the county’s residents.

That Miami has a huge Spanish-speaking population is hardly news, of course. They’ve been electing Hispanic mayors almost exclusively since 1973 and all their first-time mayors since 1985 have been Cuban-born.*

It’s arguable, at least, that people who live in Miami should be expected to be able to speak some Spanish. The problem, though, is that Miami isn’t an island. It’s a major city in an overwhelmingly English-speaking country. It’s not reasonable that Americans who live elsewhere should feel as if they’re in a foreign country when traveling domestically on business. More importantly, it threatens to isolate Miami from the rest of the country, making them less able to participate in the political system and cut off from the broader national culture.

Generally, immigrants have a strong incentive to learn English and their children do so almost universally. But that’s much less likely to happen when they can get by in their native tongue. We should expect, therefore, that this trend will continue.

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*Stephen P. Clark, who served from 1993-1996, had previously been city mayor from 1967-1970 and mayor of Miami-Dade County from 1970-1972 and 1974-1993.

Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama further elaborated on his “accidental foreign policy” agenda Friday in a speech before the Cuban American National Foundation, the Cuban exile group that historically has been a bastion of hard-line anti-Castro sentiment. In his remarks, Obama called for a “new strategy” towards Cuba and other Latin American nations and contrasted his position with those of the Bush administration and presumptive GOP nominee John McCain:

It’s time for more than tough talk that never yields results. It’s time for a new strategy. There are no better ambassadors for freedom than Cuban Americans. That’s why I will immediately allow unlimited family travel and remittances to the island. It’s time to let Cuban Americans see their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers. It’s time to let Cuban American money make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime.

I will maintain the embargo. It provides us with the leverage to present the regime with a clear choice: if you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations. That’s the way to bring about real change in Cuba – through strong, smart and principled diplomacy.

And we know that freedom across our hemisphere must go beyond elections. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is a democratically elected leader. But we also know that he does not govern democratically. He talks of the people, but his actions just serve his own power. Yet the Bush Administration’s blustery condemnations and clumsy attempts to undermine Chavez have only strengthened his hand.

We’ve heard plenty of talk about democracy from George Bush, but we need steady action. We must put forward a vision of democracy that goes beyond the ballot box. We should increase our support for strong legislatures, independent judiciaries, free press, vibrant civil society, honest police forces, religious freedom, and the rule of law. That is how we can support democracy that is strong and sustainable not just on an election day, but in the day to day lives of the people of the Americas.

Steven Taylor suggests that the risk associated with offending the Cuban-American lobby is lower than in past elections, in part because even the Cuban exile community has realized that the current policy is largely ineffective given the commercial relationships the Cuban regime has developed with most other developed countries since the fall of the Soviet Union, its former patron.

Given the divisions in the Cuba lobby, the (largely symbolic) shift of power from Fidel Castro to his brother Raul, and the likelihood that Florida will not be as pivotal a battleground in 2008 as in past elections, the days of our Cuba policy being dramatically at odds with the opinions of most Americans may be approaching their end, no matter which major party candidate is elected in November.

Matt Yglesias and Charles Krauthammer don’t agree about much but they are in convergence over the origin of Barack Obama’s foreign policy: a gaffe at last August’s YouTube debates wherein he avowed that, if elected president, he would indeed meet, “without precondition … with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.”

In an insightful piece in this month’s Atlantic, “The Accidental Foreign Policy,” Yglesias writes,

Few observers believed that Obama genuinely intended to break new ground with his response—his campaign had never articulated any such policy before, and seemed ill-prepared to defend it on the spot. The Clinton campaign dutifully pressed the attack the next day, calling Obama’s statement “irresponsible and frankly naive.” But then a funny thing happened. Obama’s team did not try to qualify (or, in political parlance, “clarify”) his remark, and no one said he misspoke. Instead, the campaign fought back, with memos to reporters and with a speech by the candidate himself, aimed squarely at the sort of “conventional wisdom” that had, in the words of his then-foreign-policy adviser, Samantha Power, “led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy.”

[...]

This position really was a departure for Obama. Despite his stand against the war in 2002, he had since hewed closely to the party line on foreign affairs. The only substantive thing he had to say about Iraq policy during his famous 2004 convention speech was: “When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they are going; to care for their families while they’re gone; to tend to the soldiers upon their return; and to never, ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.” This merely echoed the bland competence-and-execution argument of mainstream party thinking. And as Clinton’s campaign has been at pains to point out, Obama’s Senate voting record on Iraq-related issues is nearly identical to hers. Before the YouTube debate, the higher Obama’s political ambitions had reached, the more cautious his foreign policy had become.

Krauthammer concurs wholeheartedly, albeit believing the accident was much less happy. In “The Absurdity of Meeting the Enemy,” he explains,

After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity.

Should the president ever meet with enemies? Sometimes, but only after minimal American objectives — i.e. preconditions — have been met. The Shanghai communique was largely written long before Richard Nixon ever touched down in China. Yet Obama thinks Nixon to China confirms the wisdom of his willingness to undertake a worldwide freshman-year tyrants tour.

Most of the time you don’t negotiate with enemy leaders because there is nothing to negotiate. Does Obama imagine that North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela are insufficiently informed about American requirements for improved relations?

There are always contacts through back channels or intermediaries. Iran, for example, has engaged in five years of talks with our closest European allies and the International Atomic Energy Agency, to say nothing of the hundreds of official U.S. statements outlining exactly what we would give them in return for suspending uranium enrichment.

Obama pretends that while he is for such “engagement,” the cowboy Republicans oppose it. Another absurdity. No one is debating the need for contacts. The debate is over the stupidity of elevating rogue states and their tyrants, easing their isolation and increasing their leverage by granting them unconditional meetings with the president of the world’s superpower.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, I agree with Krauthammer here so far as it goes. If the choice is unconditional presidential level summits with the world’s despots or saber rattling in public while holding backchannel meetings among the professional diplomatic corps, I’ll take the latter.

As I noted in Wednesday’s episode of OTB Radio, though, I think both Obama and McCain are merely posturing on this issue for the sake of carving out identities that are more distinct than their likely policies would be. Obama is trying to brand himself as a guy who engages the world and builds consensus. But would he really be so foolish as to show up for a meeting with the Iranian mullahs and lend them the prestige of his office without some reasonable assurance of accomplishing something substantial? I can’t imagine he would. Likewise, McCain is trying to further burnish his “tough guy” persona by making it appear that he would refuse to meet with the “bad guys” without their unconditional surrender as a prerequisite. In reality, I think, he’d essentially continue the current policy of talking tough while talk goes on behind the scenes.

Photo credit: U.S. News & World Report